• With each short story and novel I write I draw from the landscape and terrain around me, and “Power Wagon” was written while elk hunting in northwestern Wyoming near Big Piney, with the Wind River Mountains to the east and the Wyoming Range to the west.
There’s a rhythm to each day while hunting that involves leaving well before dawn in subzero temperatures, returning to the camp for the middle of the day, and going back out into the mountains to hunt in the evening. Most days result in seeing no elk, but every foray is an adventure that may involve wading across ice-covered swamps and fording freezing rivers. There is also the opportunity to encounter local ranch families and to hear their stories and witness the history and culture of the area from the ground up.
I wrote the story in the hours between the morning hunt and the evening hunt, when everything I’d seen or encountered was still fresh in my mind.
Big Piney is in rough country. It’s located in Sublette County, and family histories and feuds spread out along Lower Piney Creek, Middle Piney Creek, and Upper Piney Creek. There are four-generation homesteads scattered through the pine trees, and the memories of the locals are long. There are splits and divisions even among those with the same family name, and keeping track of who likes whom and who hates whom becomes a full-time job that was almost beyond my capacity.
The isolation of the area and the independence of the locals breed long memories and colorful stories. There’s the one about the dead trapper found in a cabin in the middle of the winter, who was hauled by sleigh down to a ranch, where his body remained in the barn for three months until the ground thawed out. There’s the one about a water-rights feud between two old-time ranchers on the same drainage that ended with a tractor battle and high explosives.
And there are stories about the tangled relationships of families who grew up and either stuck or dispersed.
That’s where “Power Wagon” came from. It’s about the four adult children of a malevolent Big Piney patriarch and how they deal with their father’s death as well as a high-profile unsolved crime. Brandon, the youngest son, returns with his pregnant wife, Marissa, to sort out the financials of the inheritance. But it isn’t just the surviving children of the old man who have come back to the ranch for a reckoning.
On a bitterly cold night, when Marissa sees a single headlight strobing through the willows on the way to the house, she senses that trouble is on the way. When four disturbing people climb out of the car and approach the front door, she’s sure of it.
And so are we.
Soon Brandon will learn that the key to everything is the ancient 1948 Dodge Power Wagon that’s been parked for years inside an outbuilding. It’s described by one of the strangers as follows: “The greatest ranch vehicle ever made. Three-quarter-ton four-by-four perfected in WW Two. After the war, all the rural ex-GIs wanted one here like they’d used over there. That original ninety-four-horse, two-hundred-and-thirty-cubic-inch flathead six wouldn’t win no races, but it could grind through the snow and mud, over logs, through the brush and willows. It was tough as a damn rock. Big tires, high clearance, a winch on the front. We could load a ton of cargo on that son of a bitch and still drive around other pickups stuck in a bog.”
“Power Wagon” was written for an anthology called The Highway Kind, which was edited by Patrick Millikan. The subtitle describes it thus: “Tales of Fast Cars, Desperate Drivers, and Dark Roads” — even though the vehicle in question in this tale may not ever run again. But it does hold secrets.
The story was constructed over a week filled with blood, sweat, mud, ice, and some of the most awe-inspiring Rocky Mountain terrain in the country. I hope that atmosphere seeps through to the story itself.
Gerri Brightwell is originally from southwest Britain. She is the author of three novels: Dead of Winter (2016), The Dark Lantern (2008), and Cold Country (2002). Her short stories have appeared in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Redivider, and Copper Nickel, as well as on BBC Radio 4’s Opening Lines. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, with her husband, fantasy writer Ian C. Esslemont, and their three sons.
• One year I went through a phase of being obsessed with westerns — something about their grittiness and bravado fascinated me. There are some wonderful western novels out there (Portis’s True Grit, Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing, McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers) and spectacular films (The Revenant, the Coen brothers’ True Grit), but so many of the movies were disappointing: they relied on the same stock characters in the same stock situations. You could pretty much guess how the story was going to play out from the first few scenes.
One afternoon I found myself writing my own western (it just happened — I was working on something else when suddenly there was Matthis riding his horse down a slope, and the story took off), and though he looked every inch a hired gun out of one of those disappointing films, he had to be more than that. I wondered, What if he isn’t such a good guy? What if the point of the story isn’t a gunfight but something else? What if it’s a slow unveiling of what’s really going on?
I ended up with a story I wasn’t sure anyone would want: Who publishes westerns nowadays, especially mysterious ones? Thank you, Alaska Quarterly Review, for starting “Williamsville” on its journey.
S. L. Coney obtained a master’s degree in clinical psychology before abandoning academia to pursue a writing career. Currently residing in Tennessee, the author has ties to South Carolina and roots in St. Louis. Coney’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in St. Louis Noir, Noir at the Bar Volume 2, and Gamut Magazine.
• When I quit my doctorate program and moved to St. Louis, I immediately fell in love with the city and its people. Scott Phillips mentored me and influenced a lot of my early work, so when he asked for a contribution to St. Louis Noir I jumped at the chance. I was living in the Clayton-Tamm neighborhood — also known as Dogtown — and I am enamored of this area, with its Irish charm and St. Louis spunk. But most of all, with the old Forest Park Hospital that sat on the eastern side of the neighborhood. This was a huge brick building with contrary angles and seemingly inexplicable corners. It was torn down the year I wrote “Abandoned Places,” and so this story became my love letter to that particular bit of history.